What's a food combination that goes surprisingly well together?

Strawberries and black pepper. You’re welcome.
- Basically everything sweet with hot seasoning. One of my favorites: Mango with Chili! :-)
- Just tried this for the first time after learning about it from your comment. Pretty good! 👍
- My toddler insisted on putting pepper on her strawberries the other day.
  I laughed and said she was welcome to try, but “start on just a couple slices so you don’t ruin all of them”.
  She said it was great, but I didn’t believe her, so I tried it. And then we put pepper on all of them.
- I'd go one further; strawberry chilli sorbet. sweet strawberry, hot and cold at the same time.. perfection

Make your a salami sandwich with the following steps.
Toast the bread.
pan fry the salami slices til their a little crispy on the edges.
spread hummus on the bread once it’s toasted.
add the crispy salami, some lettuce, and seasoned tomato to your sandwich and enjoy.
People look at me sideways for using hummus as a sandwich spread, but it’s delicious.
- This is one of those recipes that I have to stop and ask what's wrong with the people in your life that they can't assess hummus, a spread frequently served on breads, with the same eyes they use on any other spread. They wouldn't think twice if you served them a board with all the listed ingredients as a grazing spread.
  
  An opened container of hummus doesn't really keep all that well. I mean, that's normal for a chip dip, where you expect to kind of go through one container pretty quickly, but most sandwich spreads will last for ages.
  considers
  I guess one could maybe try adding some sort of preservatives to improve the shelf life, if one's doing homemade hummus in a food processor.
  EDIT:
  https://old.reddit.com/r/foodscience/comments/476xdr/preservatives_for_hummus/
  Acid will help preserve the hummus against bacterial growth. Hummus has a pretty high pH so the more lemon you can add the better. Cooking it before storing or using canned chickpeas instead of dried may help too. Canned chickpeas have been retorted to be sterile while dried ones may still contain some bacterial spores. Your hummus may also go bad because the fats inside spoil. Refrigerating or freezing will slow this process but it's ultimately inevitable. Adding an antioxidant would help reduce this. The lemon juice contains citric acid which will act as an antioxidant. Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) would help too, though it will make it taste sour. Rosemary essential oil (a tiny drop will do) is a powerful antioxidant that would also help preserve your hummus. Lots of preservatives are totally natural--heat and acidity tend to be the best and most accessible preservatives.
  I also have a bottle of citric acid for preserving syrups that I suspect would work.

I have a 200 item list of grazing board foods that I've personally mixed and sampled every single 2 and 3 item combination and curated every item to be acceptable to delicious in 3 part combos.
By far the two strangest combos to any guest are the spicy salami and the dark chocolate on baguette bread or the rum dates and stone stone-ground mustard on butter cracker.
The sweet and bitter of the chocolate mixes so well with the oilly spice of the meat, and the baguette bridges the textures to provide a comfortable mouthfeel by soaking it in.
For the second, the vinegar and tang of the mustard heighten the rum without taking away the sweet paste of the dates and the cracker provides enough texture to not feel like you're eating sauce and enough salt to soften the vinegar and alcohol bite.
Honestly, it's my favorite dinner even because it's so much fun to watch people look at you in horror when you suggest they try something, then try it and see that horror melt away into absolute wonder.
- Are you willing to share the curated list? 🤞🏻
- I believe this is a multi choose problem. 200C2 is 19,900. 200C3 is 1,313,400. You've tried all 1,333,300 combinations? More actually for the items that were tried but didn't make the cut. I want the list this sounds like a culinary masterpiece

Pineapples and pizza. Yeah I said it.
- So no joke, I talked shit about pineapple on pizza for years. Then, I can't remember why specifically, but we had someone over and asked what type of pizza she wanted, and she said Hawaiian. And there was some leftover. I grew up poor, and we do not waste food, so I decided it was worth trying it.
  It was amazing. I immediately felt silly for being so against it.
  My wife still refuses to try it on principle (she did grow up near NYC, so she has STRONG opinions on pizza).
- And peach, too!

Half pure orange juice and half cola.
- Sounds similar to "Spezi", a mixture of cola and orange soda, which is quite popular here in Germany.
  
  Orange soda is very different from pure orange.
  Extra tip: use pulpy pure orange so you get little bits floating around in the brown drink. It adds extra texture. It looks absolutely disgusting, but it tastes great.
  
  Fuck u/spezi
  Oh wait, sorry, knee-jerk reaction. Carry on.

As a kid I remember jam (probably strawberry) and cheese (Cheddar or red Leicester) sandwiches being pretty awesome. For manifold reasons, peanut butter was not something made available to me back then, so that would be the closest our house ever got to that.
- Quince and cheese on crackers is a common thing, so jam cheese and bread just seems normal to me too...
  
  Another vote for the cheese and jam! Sweet and salty. I like it in a tortilla.
- I was also a weird kid mixing jam and cheese (even grape jelly and American cheese) on sandwiches to the abject horror of parents and kids alike.
  I've taken it to adulthood with cream cheese and Peruvian pepper jam (just a light spread) on a savory bagel.
  Nowadays, if you "pair" jam and cheese on a cracker instead of bread, you can avoid the weird looks entirely and even seem sophisticated.

Popcorn and pickles. Worked with a pregnant lady who had a craving for these together and, well, she wasn’t wrong.
- Wouldn’t that make the popcorn soggy?
  
  Yeah but soggy popcorn is good.
  
  Not if you eat it right away!

Chicago corn (cheddar popcorn mixed with caramel corn). Sounds weird - is awesome.
- Yes! This combo is awesome!
- Garrett was our favorite stop on the food tour!

Chocolate and anything spicy.

Both of these are established dishes, so I don't know if I could call them unexpected, but:
Jalapeno chocolate fudge cake, tried on a whim at a restaurant. Thought it might be a disaster, but hot stuff and sweet (and fatty) stuff works surprisingly well together. I suppose that it's kind of closer to how the Mesoamericans used to originally eat cocoa, which could be with chilis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_cuisine#Cacao
Chocolate could be prepared in a huge variety of ways and most of them involved mixing hot or tepid water with toasted and ground cacao beans, maize and any number of flavorers such as chili, honey, vanilla and a wide variety of spices.[31]
The ingredients were mixed and beaten with a beating stick or aerated by pouring the chocolate from one vessel to another. If the cacao was of high quality, this produced a rich head of foam. The head could be set aside, the drink further aerated to produce another head, which was also set aside and then placed on top of the drink along with the rest of the foam before serving.
Five Guys does a milkshake with bacon sprinkles that I thought sounded like it could be pretty gross, but crunchy salty apparently works with sweet fatty as well. Goes somewhat downhill as the bacon looses its crispness, though. Be interesting if there's some sort of waterproof coating that one could put on it. ("chocolate-coated bacon bits?")
- Chocolate and chipotle pepper go together very well too.

Whiskey and black licorice.
- Right after too-salty popcorn, this is one of my go-tos when watching a movie--especially with a peaty scotch.

PB & J, I mean yeah, tried and true, but it's odd that peanuts and berries go well together when both are squished 😅
- Try sunflower seed butter and honey!
- Wait til you try PB and cheddar

Macaroni and cheese and pretty much anything.
Tuna Mac: Tuna?
Tuna and any grilled vegetables?
Poverty Mac: Pork and beans?
Pork and beans AND chopped up hotdogs?
Spaghetti Mac: Leftover spaghetti sauce?
Taco Mac: Leftover taco meat?
Get the velveeta Mac and cheese for extra luxury.
- Greatest comfort food recipe ever:
  Mac, Cheese, Peas, and bacon.
  The recipes online are all nonsense. They either mix the bacon in or put it under the mac and cheese!
  White cheddar cheese sauce with macaroni. That goes into the casserole dish.
  A layer of peas on top of the mac & cheese.
  2 pounds of bacon cooked crispy and crumbled on top of the peas. From the top you shouldn't see anything but bacon.
  Put it in the oven and cook it till it starts bubbling.
  
  Yaaaass! I haven't done this in forever, but it is actually really good! Looks like I know what I'm adding to the grocery list next week.
- You have forgotten the greatest: chili Mac.
  
  It sounds like a classic, the name had that ring to it, but what do add to the Mac? Left over chili? What kind of chili?
- Mac and cheese with chopped hotdogs was a staple of my childhood. Used to drown it in ketchup to make people squirm.
  
  Hotdogs in mac and cheese is awesome! I cut the hotdog lengthwise in quarters and then into tiny bits, then cook it up in a pan for a few minutes to get the texture before adding it to the mac and cheese. Chopped bacon is also fantastic in mac and cheese.
  Adding ketchup sounds awful though.
- Peanut butter mac is pretty good, too.

Kalimotxo. It’s red wine and cola in roughly equal parts, to taste. It’s a great way to salvage old wine that’s a day or two past drinkable, especially on a hot day.
I described it once on reddit in the before times, and someone called it a “shit red wine spritzer” and I think that’s kinda apt.
- A few weeks ago I poured some cane sugar coke in a half-drink glass of Port and all my friends looked at me like I was crazy when I said it wasn't half bad
- In this same vein, cola and beer in equal proportions with a shot of amaretto tastes like snickers
  
  50/50 Guinness and cola. It's called a Black Velvet and is indulgent and lovely.
  
  @Lodespawn @EvilBit that sounds like a shortcut to a bad time
  
  I thought that said tastes like nickers, lol.
- In my country we call it bamboo for some reason.
- Otoh do not try mixing beer and wine it is awful. Truly truly awful.

Vanilla ice cream with good quality evoo and kosher salt.
- I had a hankering for vanilla ice cream and wasabi
  I enjoyed that for a while and would like to find a dairy free substitute to try again
- evoo
  ?
  kagis
  Extra-Virgin Olive Oil? With ice cream?
  
  Yeah, really. Give it a shot. Just try a little, maybe one scoop of ice cream, a little drizzle of evoo, and just sprinkle with salt (kosher is best but any will do). It makes it savory. You gotta try a couple of bites though, at least two (this is a rule I try to stick to, sometimes it takes a sec for your taste buds to figure out wtf is going on). If you hate it, you can wash the flavor out with a fresh bowl of ice cream.

Roasted cauliflower and chocolate. I like to dust coco powder in the last 3 min.
Raisins and anchovies.
Mushrooms and coffee.
Garlic, chocolate, and coffee.

Might not be that weird, but brie and pepperoni go together like they were made for each other.
- Brie, bacon, redcurrant jelly on a crusty baguette. Heaven.

PB & mustard sandwich
it delicious

I don't think that's that weird. Ginger + sour kicks ass. Not much different from a Moscow mule really.
As for me somebody turned me onto salting my watermelon slices. Pretty damn good

Salt on watermelon, and salt on pineapple.
Also, cayenne pepper on anything chocolate - brownies, ice cream, etc.
- I always squeeze some lime and grind black pepper on my watermelon. It's great!
- And some dehydrated lime and chili to that salt and you've really got something good.
  
  Isn’t that basically Tajin?

Just tried pouring some ginger ale in my lemonade (homemade).
I like orange juice with diet tonic water. Sort of shifts things in the direction of a sour grapefruit juice.
I don't know if I'd call either of them weird, though.
- My mom used to give this to us whenever we had a cold. Are you from the Southeast by any chance?
  
  Nah, it wasn't something that --- as far as I can recall, at any rate --- I picked up anywhere, started doing it on my own. I also like drinking diet tonic water straight. In general, most Americans prefer a very sweet orange juice --- which I'd swear has gotten sweeter over my lifetime --- and this ramps up the sour a bit.
  https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/02/american-orange-juice-crash/681566/
  https://archive.ph/UdW18
  European oranges skew tart because locals like their juice sour, while American varieties cater to the nation’s sweet tooth.
  I distinctly recall grapefruit juice being more sour when I was younger. Unless it's just my sense of taste changing. shrugs

Kalles kaviar, ägg, knäckebröd.
- Kalles kaviar, ägg, knäckebröd.
  Google Translate from Swedish to English: Kalle's caviar, eggs, crispbread.
  On that note, I tried getting some crispbread at one point for use with sardines. It worked, but I also liked them with jam, which I don't think that they're normally eaten with.
- Ja!!

Drink of water after artichoke or broccoli. Not sure what's going on there but I'm not the first person to wonder. Maybe it's a reaction to iron?

Date palm (its fruit) cut in half and peanut butter spread inside, surprisingly

Orange chicken with a side of chocolate milk. I stand by this, even though none of my friends are willing to give it a shot.

Blue cheese and Dr Pepper. The Dr Pepper brings out the sweetness of the cheese and the tanginess of the cheese complements the sour of the soda.
Dr Pepper is the blue cheese of soda, after all.

Peanut butter and pork chops. It's poor man's satay.

Hummus and pesto. Just dump some pesto in your hummus and thank me later. You can buy both, obviously, but you can also easily make both from scratch so it can be super cheap once you have the core ingredients. It’s basically no harder than making a smoothie.
Bonus: basil grows whether you want it to or not, at least in most climates. If you have a spice garden, you kind of have to keep basil from dominating. But it also makes an excellent, cheap gift. When I was younger, I had a basil plant that lived for a few years and got huge and I just brought clippings instead of wine (or whatever) to parties. I saved tons of money and no one has ever been like, “Get the fuck out of here with that fresh basil.”

I have recently combined my love of (real) mayo and spicy brown mustard on sandwiches and burgers and the shit is 🔥.

I never tried it myself, but one of my favorite crime writers had something in one of his books and I've never forgotten it.
The name of the book is "Out On The Rim" by Ross Thomas. The combination is a Bloody Mary with lemon meringue pie.
Even if you don't try the combination, you'll like the book.

Bacon and watermelon

Pasta and custard

Cooked Eggs (preferably poached) On toast with....
Vegemite.
You can thank me later.
- I can't imagine this working as well with anything other than poached, but I can confirm it's a winner like that. It's a more 'even' substitute for salt, I guess?
  
  Spot on
- Try miso anywhere you'd use Vegemite.

Corn and mayo.

Stoner cheesecakes: a thin wheat cracker, with a slice of white cheddar, a drop of honey, and a chocolate chip. Top it off with some Frank's Red Hot.
- You lost me at the end

Steak and pound cake. I went to a friend's house and showed up after they had already eaten dinner and were about to eat dessert. So I grabbed a leftover steak and some pound cake and ended up eating them together.
- It's somewhat similar to the burger on a donut. It's actually really good! I made a bacon cheeseburger, put it in a maple donut and almost died. Lol No ketchup or anything like that though.
  
  A Luther burger! Those are amazing. Yes agreed, very similar.

Kraft Dinner with Dill

I like apples and pineapples but not with pine needles

A fried egg on top of just about anything

Peanut butter and ajvar.

Gouda and nutella.

Peanut butter and sweet onion
I eat pb&o sandwiches then the local sweet onions are in season.
- Peanut butter and pickles
  
  Came here for this one, I was so skeptical at first but damn it's good

Cooked buckwheat groats, bilberries (those wild Nordic blueberries) and maple suryp. With some soy milk. Great breakfast! Some almonds or nuts too.

Oreos and yellow mustard. Don't knock it til you try it. Then call me a heathen, respectfully.
- Which mustard? I have four different ones in my fridge right now that are meant for different things. I recon the choice matters for oreos.
  Is it that yellow American slime?

Most types of cheese on top of hot beans

Sweet mustard on pizza

Kimchi and sweet potato. It's pretty common in South Korea too.

Isn't that basically Canada dry?

I really like savory oatmeal, and I mostly do it with fish and fennel. Great meal any time of day.

Raspberry, Dark Chocolate, Chambord. The Chocolate Passion Cookbook has my absolute favorite cake ever on its cover. My wife makes it for me every birthday. If she doesn't make it for me, she makes it for our oldest's birthday, which is only 2 weeks after mine.

Doritos and cottage cheese